The stories we tell | Assessment

Daniel Willingham tells us that stories are psychologically privileged and two of the reasons that it is useful for leaders to tell stories is that they are easier to understand and they are easier to remember. Daniel Coyle tells us that to establish purpose, we should ‘fill the windscreen with stories’ because this can help to build mental models which drive others’…

Formative assessment and school improvement

I have a vivid memory of a penny drop moment from one of Rob Coe’s presentations about CPD. It was two consecutive slides. The first slide listed all the things that teachers typically do to get children to learn difficult things: Explain what they should do Demonstrate Get them to practise Gradually remove scaffolding Tell…

Down the assessment rabbit hole

There a great scene in the Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the chance to see for himself what the matrix is. The continued references to Alice in Wonderland throughout the films are interesting and I like the way that Morpheus describes the rabbit hole analogy – it certainly fits with our relationship with assessment over…

6 questions for leaders about assessment

The time is right to challenge assessment practices and there are several questions that leaders need to think about and discuss. Question 1 What is progress? If leaders want to know whether children are making progress, the concept needs defining. For years the dominant model of progress has been numerical – a neat number that…

Coherence, not consistency | Developing shared teaching approaches

We use the High Impact Teaching Strategies. We use the Great Teaching Toolkit. We use the Walkthrus. We use Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. These authors and many more have parsed the practice of teaching, all seeking to communicate what it is that teachers do that leads to children’s learning. They can be useful to leaders…

Not everyone needs an action plan

In a previous post I elaborated on this model for school improvement that conceives of leaders’ work at three levels. The question ‘What do we do?’ is one of several questions that school leaders should think about and have well formed responses to in order to set the long term strategic direction of the school….

Layers of school improvement activity

What proportion of your time do you spend working on the actions in your school improvement plan? We have a school improvement plan and on it there are actions, timelines etc just like every other. Add the end of term 1, we analysed the time we had spent on these actions and I asked the…

Culture setting | More than words

So you want to change school culture? The common starting point is with a mission statement / values / vision of some sort. Indeed common wisdom would suggest starting with why but there are some traps to avoid in working like this. The trouble with values and mission statements Firstly, I think that the terms…

Avoiding the traps of the imagined school

In a previous post, and with a significant hat tip to Matthew Evans, I outlined some of the traps that I see related to the imagined school – the unrealistic version of our school that we hold in our imaginations. This can be somewhat different to the reality of school life. This post seeks to…

The imagined school | Traps to avoid

In The Matrix, the story starts with Neo in essentially an imagined world, far different from the related that his physical body is experiencing. Morpheus offers Neo the choice of taking the blue pill, continuing his blissfully ignorant life in this imagined world, or the red pill, opening his eyes to reality. Matthew Evans wrote a…